Employability for new-age jobs on average is mere 1.7 percent: Report

Employability for new-age jobs requiring technical, cognitive and language skills in India is merely 1.7 percent on an average, according to a report.

According to Aspiring Minds National Employability Report, only 3.84% of engineers have the technical, cognitive and language skills required for software related job in start-ups.

Additionally, a mere 3% engineers have new-age technological skills in areas like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science and Mobile Development.

On aggregate, the employability for new-age jobs is on average 1.7%. It was stated that the employability of Indian engineers continues to be painfully low with over 80 per cent engineers unemployable for any job in the knowledge economy.

The first large scale study on employability was done in 2010 and the 'stubborn unemployability' numbers seem to have held ground since the last 7 years.

The current report is based on research conducted by Aspiring Minds more than 170,000 Indian engineering students, 40,000+ and 30,000+ jobseekers in US and China.

"For India to continue to be globally competitive and keep up its growth story, we need our young graduates have new-age skills in AI, data, mobile and cloud. We find as low as 3% engineers have these skills. This is a situation which needs to be immediately remedied both for India's industry and our relevance to the world at large," said Varun Aggarwal, co-founder and CTO of Aspiring Minds.

US triumphs with a much higher proportion of engineers, almost four times as India, who know how to code.

Around 18.8% engineers applying for IT jobs in the US can write correct code, while only 4.7% can do so in India.

Whereas Indian engineers show better potential than Chinese students in writing correct code, a much higher proportion of Indian engineers, around 3 times, write code that do not even compile.

The report for the first time goes into quantifying the reasons for low employability.

Only 40% of engineering graduates end up doing an internship and 36% do any projects beyond coursework.

Only 47% engineers attended any industry talks, 60% faculty doesn't talk about industry application of concepts. This makes the engineering discipline in India very theoretical. A mere 7% of the candidate pool did multiple internships.

"NER-2019 is based on the study of data collated from the 3 million annual AMCAT assessments that we conduct globally. The report follows the highest standards of scientific methods, research and analysis to provide a credible data-based understanding of India's higher education and employability ecosystem," he concluded.